Mel McKendrick

Mel McKendrick is an active Associate Professor in Psychology at Heriot-Watt University's School of Social Sciences. As a Chartered Psychologist (Experimental), they serve as the Founding Director of SPECTRA Labs and Co-Lead for the Mental Illness and Neurological Disorders (MIND) Digital Health theme within the Global Research Institute for Health and Care Technologies. They are also the Founding CEO of Optomize Ltd, which focuses on data-driven approaches to capture and analyze performance in medical training to reduce learning curves.

Research interests center on using simulated environments, technology, and feedback to reduce anxiety and improve performance. Specializing in social cognition, face processing, and attention, they are developing the MIND Hub as a digital mental health research and data services center. Additional expertise includes performance training and assessment through the Medical Education Lab (MEL), which integrates virtual, augmented, and mixed realities; haptics; eye-tracking; 3D object recognition; and robotics for medical training applications.

Recent publications demonstrate strong focus on hologram-guided medical procedures, ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia training, and digital mental health interventions. Their work shows consistent growth in research output from 2008 through 2025, with significant contributions in medical simulation technologies and cognitive aspects of medical training.

• 1st prize award from the Association of Anaesthesia 2025 Innovation in Anaesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Award
• EPSRC-funded Research Project 'Immersive Augmented Reality (AR) experience design to improve mental health and depression' (2023, £84,074)
• Winning Team 2022 European Crucible Project Pitching Competition for 'MAVKA: Co-creative gamified storytelling for trauma'
• Winning Team Product Forge Hackathon

Mel McKendrick actively supervises PhD students and has secured funding from EU Horizon, EPSRC, and NHS collaborations. Their work spans medical education technologies, digital mental health applications, and cognitive aspects of medical performance. They manage specialized equipment including eye-tracking systems (Pupil Core add on for HTC Vive Pro and Pupil Neon) and have organized numerous workshops including the Mental Health & Neurodivergent Digital Health workshop and Patient Focussed Medical Education Workshop in 2024.